Alpha-male Los Angeles police narc Alonzo Harris makes up his own rules as he rolls along. The tough, brazenly smiling detective sergeant never sets foot in police headquarters. His office is his black Monte Carlo on the streets of the city. From the driver's seat, he runs a top narcotics squad by breaking every regulation he can.

This day, however, he's breaking in a rookie who'll get the lesson of his life. It's "Training Day."

This is a bullet-hot police action drama built around Denzel Washington. It is so propulsive so much of the time, it almost looks as if it's going to go the distance. If Washington & Co. don't quite manage to bring it home, the getting there sure is something.

Longtime Washington fans should forget everything they ever thought they knew about this actor, who usually projects quintessential decency in movies. "Training Day" starts off letting him, as Alonzo, show flashes of a rogue-cop side that will make people wonder just how far he's going to go. It also provides an always-keep-'em-guessing role for him that, finally a little too obviously, has Oscar written all over it.

Anybody would expect Washington to be terrific. Co-star Ethan Hawke is the surprise. Hawke, as rookie Jake Hoyt, has the much less flashy but no less effective acting job here. He keeps up with Washington every step of the way.

They are a pleasure to watch -- right up almost to the end, when "Training Day" just can't pass up the temptation to go completely overboard. Washington, all in black with dangling silver crosses, might as well have "Here comes the big speech" tattooed on his forehead, too.

Some training day. It begins, amazingly, with a hit of inferior grass laced with PCP, which the sergeant gives the rookie, and it's not long before he is cockeyed. "A good narcotics agent must have narcotics in his blood," Alonzo says. Washington's disarming smile has steel behind it. Jake is not sure whether to believe Alonzo or not.

His skepticism is well founded, even if it takes him a while to fully grasp the situation. Before the morning is over, the dope will be followed by a shot of whiskey and a beer. The narcs will even have a glass of a nice red wine with a luncheon gathering of police brass.

Don't get the idea "Training Day" is about drinking and doper cops. We're just getting started here, and it will get very hairy. All the action takes place in the course of one long day. Periodically, there are glimpses of the sun rising, then setting, and the climax takes place in the middle of a very dark night that Jake has good reason to doubt he will survive. As early as mid- morning, there already will be three bullet holes in the rear window of the Monte Carlo.

Washington plays Alonzo like a con man with a one-two punch: He's got a confident stream of palaver but always a hidden agenda. He disarms the neophyte with a joke and then punches home his real point. Hell, he even howls like a wolf: "We're wolves protecting the sheep." It is tour-de-force acting: The same way Alonzo draws people in, so does Washington draw in the audience. Then, snap! Gotcha!

Alonzo, who has a matched set of pistols, doesn't hesitate to mete out street justice as often as he ignores crime that's not worth his attention. "You let the garbage men handle the garbage," he tells Jake. "We go after the big fish." He will let people off the hook after shaking them up. "You wanna go to jail or you wanna go home?" he will demand, and from what we've already seen, it could double back on him.

Listen carefully and Alonzo starts to sound mad. Could he be as much of a sociopath as the big fish he's after?

"You've got today to show what you've got," Alonzo tells Jake, and the rookie certainly will. Jake proves his mettle early on when he leaps into an alley and breaks up a rape attempt. Throughout the day, the crimes will escalate as it becomes apparent that the movie is working its way up the food chain, with Alonzo going after a big-time dealer, "the Sandman."

The places Alonzo takes Jake keep getting more treacherous. There is one neighborhood, presented as a kind of self-contained garrison, which Alonzo warns Jake never to enter by himself. There are some tattooed, tough mothers inside this stronghold as well as policing it. Other characterizations will turn vicious. "Training Day" enters turf where cops and criminals may be two sides of the same coin. Good men will emerge from both sides, but it will be bloody.

"Training Day" has a lot to say about macho posturing. It may be the strongest attitude driving a number of scenes, including the one with the police brass.

So many elements of this hyped-up movie, directed by Antoine Fuqua (R&B videos and Chow Yun-fat's "The Replacement Killers"), are so vividly done that when something doesn't come off it's not for lack of trying. The buildup of violence may even remind some of Sam Peckinpah films. The writing, by David Ayer, gives Washington extraordinary fiber -- "I'll slap the taste out of your mouth," Alonzo says -- but there's one coincidence so outlandish only Charles Dickens could get away with it.

Rapper actors Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are on opposite sides of the law -- or seem to be -- in "Training Day," and Macy Gray is the tough occupant of a house the narcs enter with a phony warrant -- a Chinese takeout menu. Scott Glen's know-how lends gnarly believability to the role of an old buddy of Alonzo's who was drummed out of the force.

Early on, when Alonzo's bravado is on the ascendancy, I had a flash that this is what the overly slick remake of "Shaft" should have been like. That cockeyed notion sure changed radically. Clues to how the action will be transformed are very carefully placed but become fully apparent only when it is all over in what must be one of the longest fusillades since "Bonnie and Clyde."